With most every existing performing-arts organization now back up and running, the next step in the overall recovery of the local arts economy is brand new, post-pandemic life.

The metro’s first new live theater venture to launch since the pandemic will be the new Visionbox Cocktail Theatre, which, after several false starts, bows April 7-8 with John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” at the Field House, an events center located next to Mile High Stadium at 1600 Federal Blvd.

This new weekend series curated by Denver’s Jennifer McCray Rincón brings a whole new business and artistic model to the Denver theater scene. It’s patterned after the Yale Cabaret, meaning it features edgy, mostly new and, more than anything else – short theater pieces that are over in less than an hour and run for one weekend only.

“We’re trying to do with live theater what live music has always done,” said Rincón. “When you go see a great concert at the Fillmore, it doesn’t run for a month. You get maybe two or three nights. That’s it. And the next week, there’s something new.”

The Cocktail Theatre will not be a subscriber-based company. The rotating weekend format will allow Rincón to feature local playwrights and experiment with both contemporary and forgotten gems such as the upcoming “Two by Tenn” – two one-acts by Tennessee Williams (“Talk to Me Like the Rain” and Let Me Listen”).

“I guarantee you, what people come to see performed here, they have never seen before,” Rincón said. There will be minimal sets and production values, she added, “because it’s all about the writing and the acting.”

The vibe Rincón is going for is a night on the town – before your night on the town. You drop in at 6 p.m. for an hour of drinks, light food and live music. The play starts at 7 and then, boom, you’re off to the rest of your night by 8 o’clock.

Rincón, who was trained at the Yale School of Drama, has been in Denver for 31 years, including a 17-year stint as head of acting at the Denver Center’s now retired master’s conservatory program. In 2010, she opened Visionbox Studio to provide student and professional theater artists with training rooted in graduate-level curriculum. That training often culminates in public performances that will now become part of the Cocktail Theatre series.  “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” will feature Boulder’s Hallie Schwartz and Trevor Lyons, who consider Visionbox their home theater company.

Rincón has deep New York theater connections, including long associations with Shanley (“Moonstruck”) and TV star Bill Pullman. Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” is the story of two broken people who meet in a bar and find love and redemption in one night.

“It’s a play about two people desperate for connection,” Shanley said. “I think we’re all a bit that way after the last couple of years. Live theater is the quick road back to community. I’m so pleased Visionbox is mounting ‘Danny’ in Denver.”

Tickets are $45. Information at visionbox.org

Colorado stars kick up their ‘Kinky Boots’

Two of the people most excited that “Kinky Boots” is finally being staged at the Arvada Center after a 20-month COVID delay are Colorado natives Annaleigh Ashford and Andy Kelso, who were members of the original Broadway cast back in 2013. It’s the story of young Charlie Price, who has reluctantly taken over his father’s foundering men’s shoe business, which is saved when he partners with a drag performer named Lola to create fabulous boots for a new clientele.

“I’m so proud that ‘Kinky Boots’ is coming to a Colorado stage, and with a scenic design by my dear friend Brian Mallgrave,” said Ashford, a graduate of Wheat Ridge High School who originated the role of assembly worker Lauren in “Kinky Boots” on Broadway and is now the star of the CBS sitcom “B Positive.” “The heartbeat of the show is palpable, and I’m so honored I got to be a small piece of a special story that reminds people, ‘If they can change their mind, they can change the world.’”

Kelso, who graduated from Eaglecrest High in Aurora, was promoted from the ensemble to play Charlie three times from 2014-19. “‘Kinky Boots’ at the Arvada Center sounds like a mega-mix of two monumental moments in my life,” he said. “I got my (union) card at the Arvada Center doing ‘The Drawer Boy’ (in 2003), and the day after that show closed, I made the big move to New York City.”

“Kinky Boots” was the first time Kelso was a part of an original Broadway cast, and he was brought back to play Charlie for the show’s closing performances in 2019. “The fact that regional theaters across the country are producing ‘Kinky Boots’ is thrilling to me, and I can’t think of a better venue for the show to make its local debut than at the Arvada Center,” he said. “As we used to huddle and cheer during every performance before Act 2: ‘Oi! Oi! Oi! BOOTS!’”

“Kinky Boots,” with Tim Howard as Charlie Price, Abigail Kochevar as Lauren and David Kaverman as Lola, runs through April 24 at the Arvada Center. Information

Local film leader’s take on Oscars

After years of declining ratings, Sunday’s Oscars telecast had a very low bar to clear in terms of bringing back some of the telecast’s past greatness. And for the most part (that slap notwithstanding), Sie FilmCenter Artistic Director Keith Garcia thinks the Academy got it pretty much right. Most evidently in terms of diversifying the nominees, presenters and performers. What we saw on Sunday, Garcia said, was the result of an overhaul of the Academy that’s been years in the making.

“That began with a purging of the old guard a few years ago and inviting in a new diverse table of voting members,” Garcia said. “We always knew it was going to take a few years – if not also a pandemic – before all that diversifying would start to be reflected in the nominees and in the winners and in the telecast. But we saw that on Sunday night.”

Garcia’s favorite moment was seeing Ariana DeBose win for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first openly queer woman of color to win an Oscar. But it was telling, he added, how milestones are, by their very nature, a commentary on decades of troubled history. DeBose is now only the second Latina to ever win an Oscar, following Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the original “West Side Story.”

“For all the talk about diversity and things changing, the fact that a Latina had not won a major acting award in 60 years tells you there is still so much work to do,” Garcia said.

Oh, and about that whole “Slap Heard ‘Round the World”? Garcia knows how that whole debacle could have been easily avoided.

“Somebody must have thought it would be a really good idea to get rid of all those stairs you normally have to climb up on your way to the podium, because people always trip on them, and women get caught in their dresses – so they got rid of them,” Garcia said. “But I say, if those 10 steps had still been there, then that incident never happens. I think Will Smith stands there at the bottom of the stairs and yells and goes back and sits down.”

Briefly …

No one is hotter in comedy right now than Oscars co-host Amy Schumer (who by the way delivered a wonderful, overlooked acting performance in the family drama “The Humans” last year). At press time, she was 10 tickets away from selling out the last of four upcoming shows at the Paramount Theater on Aug. 27-28 …

Lighthouse Writers Workshop broke ground Wednesday on its $2.4 million, 11,000 square-foot permanent home for the literary arts community at 3844 York St. … The Molly Brown House Museum’s new “Heroine of the Titanic” exhibit opens Friday … Former inmate Daniel Guillory will co-read his autobiographical monologue about the inhumanity of the prison system alongside Brett Lee Shelton, senior staff attorney of the Native American Rights Fund, as part of Boulder’s MOTUS Theater’s ongoing “Just Us” project. It streams at 5:30 p.m. Sunday (April 3) …

Novelist and Beat poet Jack Kerouac’s birthday was 100 years ago on March 12. As legend has it, Kerouac was inspired to write his most famous work, “On the Road,” after living in Lakewood during the summer of 1949. Heritage Lakewood’s free exhibit “Fields of Green and the Great Mountains: Jack Kerouac in Lakewood” features letters, artifacts and photos through Sept. 11.

And finally …

There sure was a lot of Colorado in the Montana-based second season of ABC’s “Big Sky.” Denver actor Marty Lindsey played the absentee father of two latchkey kids who went terribly astray. And after they somehow escaped certain death) – he shipped them off to boarding school. On the same episode, longtime Denver stage and film actor Brian Landis Folkins making his network TV debut in the season finale playing the fake ambulance driver who suffocates freaky bohemian Wolf Legarski. That appears to bring an end to Denver native John Carroll Lynch’s time on the series to a close after two seasons playing two characters and many more near-death experiences. (But he’s survived far worse than a bag over his head, so never say never).